Sunday, December 15, 2013

Favourites of 2013

As always, I didn’t cover the year’s releases
comprehensively enough to say these ten are the best, but they’re among the new
films I most enjoyed watching. I would have said I really don’t go to the TIFF
Lightbox that often, but the record shows it’s where I saw eight of these, so
maybe I’m the archetypal Lightbox patron. I hope no one finds out!

All is Lost (J C Chandor)

Here’s a film to make you realize how little you
actually saw Robert Redford in his
heyday, how classic lighting and framing softened our sense of him, internally
and externally. Chandor strips away his hiding places, both literally and
figuratively, placing him alone and battered on a grievously damaged yacht,
trying to survive. Likewise putting himself right out on the line, the director
impressively avoids making his film too existentially schematic, or overloading
it with symbolic significance; he certainly shows up the trite
characterizations that marred Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity.

Amour (Michael Haneke)

Haneke’s Oscar-winning study of a long-married couple
approaching the end of their lives is much less oppressive and depressing than
some commentators claimed: the point, it seems to me, is that a love (or whatever it might be) that sustains an
intertwined life for so long, and especially a life that’s not merely
functional and morose, is created by and belongs entirely to its participants,
inherently beyond the knowledge of others. It’s a mesmerizing viewing
experience, composed with such specific weight that it holds itself in your
mind for much longer than most films do, even good ones. And of course, as
everyone says, the performances are fairly spellbinding.

Bastards (Claire Denis)

Denis’
latest film is one of her bleakest pieces of material: a contemporary film
noir, constructed from classic raw materials, which might intermittently make
you think of Polanski’s Chinatown,
albeit with myriad differences. It again demonstrates her immense power as a
filmmaker – forcing us into contradictory impressions and reactions, into
constantly reassessing what’s before us and thus in some way ourselves, and her
interests and affinities seem almost boundless. For me, it’s somewhat too
tightly wound to carry the impact of her very finest works, but only for one of
the greatest of filmmakers could you place such a richly controlled, allusive
film on any kind of second rank.

Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mongiu)

Mongiu’s film is set in more or less the present day, in a
small Orthodox convent set above a small rural Romanian town, where a young
woman’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. It’s easy to simplify the
picture as an exercise in metaphysical despair, and to caricature the
simplicity of Mongiu’s filmic language. But it’s much more multi-faceted than
that, drawing on very tangible attention to detail, and carefully placing the
charged events in the context of the local community, of the mundane, transient
preoccupations of the modern world. Perhaps in the end justice will be done, as
that’s defined, but whether that bears any correlation with truth or progress
is unknowable.

Blue is the
Warmest Colour
(Abdellatif Kechiche)

My review of this year’s winner at Cannes certainly
contained more caveats than those of the other nine films included here: I
called it “a kind of greatest hits album of young contemporary lesbianism” and
said: “if you have qualms about films that define women by their physicality
and sexuality to a degree that men rarely have to endure, you won’t find much
consolation here.” So maybe in a stronger year, it wouldn’t make my best ten. But
its main actress Adele Exarchopoulos is a mesmerizing presence, powering a film
that works best if you think less about the modern world and more about old
actress-infatuated melodramas.

Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)

Baumbach’s gently shifting
study of a young woman trying to make her way in modern-day New York – that is,
in Girls territory, basically - is so
subtle and skillful, it almost makes that show, and his own previous work, look
heavy-handed; among much else, it confirms all the buzz about its star and
co-writer Greta Gerwig as the truest current heir to classic Hollywood. The
film’s evocations of the French New Wave, and its black and white
cinematography, place it in a tradition of eternally provocative and fulfilling
cinema, created out of relative poverty of means, ventilated by a rejection of
deadening conventions.

Ginger &
Rosa (Sally
Potter)

Potter’s film follows two friends in England in 1962, deep
in the folds of the Cold War and of nuclear escalation; a time when it’s
plausible to think the world might be on the edge of wiping itself out,
spawning a fruitful time for radicalism and activism. Potter immerses herself
with great skill in the intimacy of interactions and experiences, and if the
film is relatively more formally conventional than most of her previous work,
its “feminist” power is undiluted, as Ginger ultimately starts to feel her way
to a radicalized identity beyond rhetoric and clichés.

Like Someone in
Love (Abbas
Kiarostami)

Kiarostami’s Japanese-made film, built around a young woman
sent by a pimp to the house of an elderly professor, was largely marginalized
as a prime example of “art” cinema, but I found the film as suspenseful as any
straightforward thriller, almost unbearably so in its final stretch. It lacks
the raw elements of clichéd filmic beauty but is as ravishing as anything
you’ll ever see: every scene is a small miracle of composition and light,
sometimes astounding you with its simplicity, sometimes with its detail. And it
draws meaningfully on notions of female oppression and lack of empowerment, and
on a broader feeling of siege and dissatisfaction.

Something in the
Air (Olivier
Assayas)

Assayas’s film about a group of young people in 1971,
immersed in art and politics, represents a very specific and very French time
and place; among much else, it’s consistently ravishing to look at. But its
horizons are far from narrow – the film overflows with ideas and possibilities,
causing you to reflect on (in Assayas’ words) the “predetermined obsolescence”
of so many other movies. In the end the characters start to move on or
compromise, but what wouldn’t you give to live in a time where even the
compromises are so thrilling?

A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhang-ke)

Jia’s
masterly film consists of four loosely-connected episodes, each a story of
systemic injustice in modern-day China, ending in personal tragedy. At times,
it has the startlingly brutal and bloodily stylized moments that form the basic
grammar of the “action” genre, but it redeploys them not as periods, leading
nowhere except into their own sick entrails, but rather as question marks,
profoundly probing the environment that gave rise to them. Although certainly
pessimistic, it’s constantly visually ravishing, filled with remarkable compositions.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).